Since this is a serialized book and no longer a blog per se, it might be helpful to begin with a one paragraph top line summary of yesterday’s bottom line, in order to provide context and continuity. If you read yesterday’s post, you are free to skip it:
McGilchrist suggests that our spontaneous intuitions of God are a function of the RH, since it is the hemisphere that “brings us closer to the truth than the left.” He further agrees with Bob — as do few others in this world — that the word “God” is unavoidably problematic, so in order to properly glish the unglishable, we require a translinguistic placeholder to avoid LH idolatry. He concludes that what we really need “is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word.” Axiom 10 of cosmotheandrism proposes the unword O in order to git ‘er done.
∞
The sacred mountain, seat of the Gods, is not to be found in space even though it is visible and tangible. —Frithjof Schuon
In other words, first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is, in what amounts to the endless LH—> RH —> LH cycle we’ve already discussed a time or two.
In order to say “God,” we have already in a sense captured God. But no one can presume to capture O, which for Jews is the unsayable YHVH, or designated in the East by terms such as Tao or Nirguna Brahman, each of these being translinguistic experiences of O that shatter or repel speech. So, don’t confuse the cataphatic LH map with the apophatic RH territory. Note again that we don’t want to simply bar the LH from theologizing, rather, to acknowledge its complementary but ultimately junior role in this vertical endeavor.
As to the ineffability of O, McGilchrist agrees that “there is almost certainly more here than we have words for, or can expect ever to understand using [LH] reason alone. Such an expectation itself would be irrational.” This doesn’t actually just apply to O, rather, to everything, because Gödel said so: uppercase Reason in the fullest sense has direct intellection of what transcends lowercase reason.
In other words, the realm of vertical intellection cannot be reduced to any LH map. McGilchrist suggests that “The proper response to this realisation is not argument, but awe.” And the Anthropos is — I am at any rate — awe-ware of “a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable, that, if we can just for once get beyond words and reasons, is a matter of experience,” this being the Great Attractor, which is — wait for it — a coming attraction in Book III.
McGilchrist does not pretend to be a theologian, so he traces our cerebral asymmetry back to nematodes near the bottom of the biosphere, but what if such creatures are actually fractals of a divine logosphere reflected herebelow in neurology? Think of how, in the words of McGilchrist, “The LH aims to narrow things down to a certainty, while the RH opens them up into possibility.” Here we are merely suggesting that LH necessity and RH possibility might be anchored in the Divine Mind, and why not? It’s either that or nematodes.
You just have to outsmart, as it were, the LH, because it tends not to stay in its epistemological lane. Rather, it is very much beset by the neurocosmic Dunning-Krugery referenced above, whereby “it has no sense of the limits of its own understanding.” Rather, “It operates inside a framework, within which all questions are referred back, and all answers form part of a reassuringly familiar schema; if they don’t they are simply pronounced nonsense.”
This can redound to a closed loop, so anything outside the loop is nonexistent or imaginary. It doesn’t have an appropriately humble meta-view of itself, nor does it “see the bounds of its own world view; in order to do that, it would have to see there is something beyond the bounds — and that is something it cannot do.”
Or, cannot do in the absence of its complementary hemisphere.
Now, McGilchrist’s description may or may not be “neurologically true,” but it is true in every other respect, so it might as well be. Humans are forever confining themselves to their own ideological matrices. It has been a permanent temptation since Genesis 3.
The properly anthropic habitat must be a place where both left and right brains are at home. Because it is not as if one can ever actually eliminate the latter, rather, it will return in some form, whether spiritually frivolous or ideologically toxic.
Memo to the universe: You’re not all that.
Nevertheless, we cannot return to the enchanted world of prelapsarian man, but is there a way forward to a post-disenchanted Cosmos? Such a Cosmos would be one in which a religious vocabulary — or what we call a grammar of infinitude — is full of genuine meaning, one in which verticality and transcendence are as real as — actually, more real than — immanence and horizontality.
∞
At the end of the deity, Either God or chance; all other terms are disguises for one or the other.
But chance produces nothing and explains nothing. Rather, chance has no causal power, but is merely the probability of something happening for other reasons. It is not an entity or substance, nor does it have any power to cause anything to happen. Supposing I flip a coin 100 times, I’m telling you there’s a chance it will come up heads each time. But what are the chances that such an unlikely outcome is a result of chance?
Likewise, there is no chance that chance is a sufficient explanation of being, mind, life, or anything else, for this is just a measure of our ignorance of real causes.
Yes, but isn’t O too just another name for your ignorance?
No, it adverts to the very principle, ground, and possibility of intellect, intelligibility, meaning, and truth, or the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility toward which Anthropic knowers are ordered.
We will wind down this lengthy foray into neurocosmology with the following, as we have already ventured too far into material more appropriate for Book III. O functions precisely as McGilchrist’s unword, for
if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved.
In other words, there are certain weighty areas of life whereby achievement constitutes a failure to achieve.
∞
One last question before moving on from neurocosmology: might our ultimate Principle itself have a left and right brain?
Of course not. It is necessarily trans-material.
True, but could there be a kind of bilateral or maybe even trilateral asymmetry in O reflected herebelow?
We’ve already discussed how Absolute and Infinite are ultimate complementarities (Axiom 2), and how this dynamism implies the necessity of possibility. Moreover, “creation” and “possibility” must be two words for the same principle. Schuon goes so far as to suggest that Creator and creation — or O and its infinite entailments — are “coeternal,” which may sound a tad off key until you realize that what he really means is simply the tautology that it is in the nature of a Creator to create. So, “cosmic and coeternal manifestation is necessary because God is necessary, whereas ‘creation is free because it is not ‘the manifestation’ but ‘a manifestation’” (emphasis mine).
The perfections of both Absolute necessity and Infinite freedom must be copresent in our Theos Principle, even though, from the Anthropic standpoint, it is impossible for us to harmonize them, since necessity would seem to be the opposite of freedom. But in the Theos, necessity does not imply constraint, nor freedom arbitrariness.
For our purposes it is enough to know that the Cosmic Area Rug is woven of Absolute and Infinite, which are mirrored herebelow in the form of necessity and freedom, respectively. Absolute and Infinite are very much analogous to LH and RH, only as applied to divinity, for the LH is a little like Absolute Necessity, and RH a bit like Infinite Possibility.
So, we formally reject the scientistic magician’s rulebook that tries to build its tower of babble from the bricks with which it is composed. Instead, we posit One Big Miracle: an eternally subsistent, conscious, and creative principle (O). Everything else is a logical and luminous consequence of this prior source, or in the words of Norris Clarke, “Mind is for being, and reciprocally being is for mind.” Conversely, the problem with materialism is that the bums who propose it can never make ends meet, because the dumb material end can never reach the immaterial intelligent end.
The bums will always lose, do you hear me? THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS—
Yes, we hear you.
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